“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,” the economist Milton Friedman once quipped, “in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” The U.S. Mint, to its credit, had a much longer run. The Federal Reserve, which purchases coins from the Mint…
(This is the last of a three-part series.) In my first and second posts addressing a recent Bank of Canada Working Paper by Ben Fung, Scott Hendry, and Warren E. Weber, I argued that the paper exaggerates the shortcomings of Canada's 19th-century currency system, with its reliance…
(Originally appeared on June 19, 2013.) Kurt's recent post on NGDP targeting just happens to come right on time to introduce one I'd been contemplating concerning the connection between such targeting and free banking. While many readers may suppose the two things to represent alternative, if not…
At the Mercatus / Cato CMFA conference a few weeks ago on “Monetary Rules for a Post-Crisis World,” David Laidler and David Glasner gave interesting and informative talks on the history (and history of economic thought) regarding the evolution of monetary rules during the first panel. Video…